Sundance revives torture debate

Associated Press

Published 12:09 pm, Thursday, January 24, 2013

PARK CITY, Utah — The filmmaker behind an Osama bin Laden documentary at the Sundance Film Festival says the debate over the accuracy of Hollywood's take on the story detracts from the deeper moral questions involved.

Greg Barker, director of “Manhunt: The Search for Bin Laden,” said criticism over Kathryn Bigelow's Academy Award-nominated “Zero Dark Thirty” is a political issue that's oversimplifying the matter.

“Zero Dark Thirty” has drawn fire from Washington lawmakers who say the film inaccurately depicts torture as integral in producing leads that led to bin Laden's death in a Navy SEALs raid in Pakistan in 2011.

Most Popular

“The fact is, what our special operations do is conduct kill-capture operations all the time, and many people die in those,” Barker said. “Maybe that's what we want as a country, but we have to actually address it and understand it to really know what's going on. And so I just think that trying to say, well, was it coercive interrogation? I mean, maybe, probably, is my personal opinion, there was an element of that. Was that all of it? Certainly not. Is that what we should focus on? I don't think so.”

“Manhunt,” debuting on HBO in May, uses extensive interviews with CIA officers, military operatives and others involved in tracking bin Laden as he rose to power calling for jihad against the United States in the 1990s and in the war on terror after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.

Barker said the debate needs to cut deeper than simple for-or-against opinions about torture. Whether from al-Qaida or some other source, “we're going to be back in this situation again,” Barker said.